Mind is the Framework for Perception
Subjectivity, used here synonymously with consciousness, awareness, or knowing, is beingness. It is the “I am” that is prior to any qualification.
Subjectivity is not a state of mind. States of mind, the content of experience, appear within subjectivity. This distinction is important to understand. As the fundamental reality, subjectivity precedes experience and is that by which experience is known.
However, in order to know the world, subjectivity requires a perceptual faculty through which to perceive. Subjectivity without perception is like an empty mirror, capable of reflecting anything but having no perceptual content of its own. So from the vantage point of subjectivity, prior to the mind, there are no perceptions, no representations, no objects in awareness. In other words, without the mind there is no experience of subject-object relationship.* There is only subjectivity’s infinite potential, the unmanifest ground of being.
Appearances within consciousness, the this and that, come into being through the faculties of a finite mind, through perceptions, thoughts, feelings and sensations.
(The next step in understanding is to allow for the possibility that subjectivity is universal, that your consciousness and my consciousness are not two separate consciousness. Rather, private inner experiences are an activity of the mind, a localized limitation within pure subjectivity. So while I may not have access to your mental state, and you may not have access to mine, that which knows mental states is the source of both. Subjectivity is the substance, so to speak, from which all perceptions are made.)
By recognizing the mind’s role in perception, we have the opportunity to see beyond the appearances of separation to the shared reality of all that is.